In just over three weeks it will be three years since Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old woman, was abducted, raped and murdered by a serving police officer. As women around the country repeated ad nauseam at the time: she was just walking home when someone who was meant to keep her safe did the unthinkable. Women cannot and will not forget.
Just like we won’t forget the pair of Met Police constables who took photos of two murdered sisters, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, in June 2022, shared the images on WhatsApp groups with their mates and described them as “dead birds”.
They are now in prison. But we won’t forget. Mina Smallman, their stoic, brave and kind mother, has kept on speaking out about what needs to change to make sure we don’t.
Baroness Casey’s report last year into the Metropolitan Police, commissioned after the murder of Sarah Everard, concluded that the force is broken and rotten, suffering collapsing public trust and guilty of institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia.
Last week, Thames Valley Police referred itself to the policing regulator after a BBC investigation found that officers had ridiculed a female assault victim. Body-worn video showed her groin while she had a seizure; three male PCs watched the footage without reason.
I could go on. I could also mention that this column isn’t looking to smear all police officers – especially those trying to clean this utter mess up – but I hope that is obvious and accepted in good faith.
Three years on from an abuse of trust and a killing so cruel and shocking it stopped a nation in its tracks, it is worth noting that figures from a YouGov poll carried out for the domestic abuse charity Refuge have found that most women – 53 per cent – feel that the police have made little or no progress in addressing problems of sexism and misogyny among officers over the past year.
While it’s important to know that many police officers are working to keep us all safe, it doesn’t seem enough to reassure women that the force as a whole is on our side. But who is? How do we rebuild trust and faith, while realising at the same time that we have no choice but to hope the systems we have created in civilised society will catch us when we need them?
There is a woman right now in this position, albeit an extreme version. A woman who has survived being held at gunpoint by her ex-boyfriend and is now facing the reality that he is about to be released after finishing his prison sentence.
I spoke to this woman this week on Woman’s Hour, just days before his release. Her name is Rhianon Bragg. She had been stalked by her ex and held at gunpoint for eight hours before he let her go to the doctor’s, where she was able to raise the alarm to the authorities.
Gareth Wyn Jones is now being set free after serving a four-and-half-year sentence. This is despite a parole hearing finding he was not safe to be in the community.
Rhianon wholeheartedly believes he will re-offend: “We are told there are strict licensing conditions and he has to adhere to these, but my point has always been the consequences for the victim are so much worse.
“It does feel like, not just me, but any victim in these circumstances is a guinea pig.”
Of the night he ambushed her with a gun – she was thankfully alone and not with her four children – Rhianon recalls: “I pulled up, got out of the car, and then from just in front of me, Gareth leapt out from the shadows, shotgun up at my chest. I screamed. It was a shock but not a surprise.” She says she focused on staying alive, “minute by minute”.
Now Rhianon has no choice but to put her faith in a probation system she describes as overstretched and a police force that took two weeks to initially arrest Wyn Jones – an amount of time she describes as horrendous, especially as he was a licensed weapon holder.
The police then returned his guns to him when the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) failed to charge him in the first instance – an act that would have changed everything. The CPS admitted it made a mistake and apologised to Rhianon.
And yet Rhianon, despite her case being raised by her local MP to the Lord Chancellor and having secured a meeting with the probation minister, now finds herself in another awful situation. What can she do? Lean back into the systems that failed to stop a man stalking her until it escalated to the point he threatened her with a weapon.
She feels she has done all she can to try and keep herself and her family safe. It’s also worth noting she lives very rurally in Wales – which provides a whole other range of issues – from limited phone signal to isolation. I had never spoken to anyone in this position at this particular moment – awaiting the release of someone they fear, someone they need protecting from.
If ever there was a case for our policing and justice systems to demonstrate how they can all kick into action and truly look after a woman, it is Rhianon’s. Even women in her situation have no choice but to try to rebuild that trust in the police again. There is no other option. The founder and director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, Harriet Wistrich, who works on such cases and to root out misogyny and malpractice in the police, agrees.
Women still have to have faith that their case will be handled appropriately because we cannot let perpetrators off. And nor should we. That would be an even more dangerous road to go down.
So we are watching and listening. We are surveilling as best we can. We will pay attention. And we are holding the families of Sarah Everard, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry and the many others very close to our hearts indeed.
Emma Barnett presents Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio Four